Multilevel public funding for small business innovation: a review of US state SBIR match programs

US State governments invest in early-stage innovative activity as an economic development strategy. Nevertheless, attention directed at the public sector’s role in this capacity has been placed on federal policy actions overlooking the growing role of states. The primary aims of this paper are two-fold: (1) to articulate the motivations for multilevel public support for small business innovative activity, placing emphasis on state level incentives directed towards entrepreneurial activity; and (2) to empirically evaluate the State Match Phase I (SMP-I) program. The SMP-I program is a diffuse state level policy designed to complement the federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program by offering noncompetitive matching funds to the state’s successful SBIR Phase I recipients. This offers an opportunity to examine the marginal impact of public R&D given the state intervention. This paper employs a state and year fixed effects model and considers two outcome variables—SBIR Phase II success rates and SBIR Phase I application activity. To account for industrial heterogeneity, the data are stratified by the federal mission agencies. Results from the empirical analysis indicate that the state match increases the Phase II success rates for firms participating in the National Science Foundation SBIR program.     

China-Central Asia Cooperation Forum Produces Good Results

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the five Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the CPAFFC     

城市道路平面交叉口现状分析和控制方案设计——以昆明市教场中路与教场北路交叉口为例

道路交叉口的交通信号控制,旨在通过减少平面交叉口内交通流所产生的冲突点和交织点,提高路口的通行能力,使交通流在交叉路口内能够确保安全并快速通过。城市道路交叉口往往交通流情况复杂,人员密集,交通流量大,一旦缺乏有效的交通控制方式,极易造成交通秩序混乱并引发交通拥堵。本文通过对昆明市一个道路交叉口交通现状进行调查与分析研究,设计并提出合理有效的交通控制方案。     

Thoreau in the 21<Superscript>st</Superscript> Century

Laura Dassow Walls’s superb biography of Henry David Thoreau is the most important study of this author thus far in the twenty-first century. Beautifully written, and packed with rich detail and subtle interpretation, Walls’s book teaches us much that is new about Thoreau and, furthermore, prompts us to think more deeply about and reassess this complex person and challenging writer—a writer whose range and mass of published and unpublished work, produced during his all too brief life (he died at age 44), is astounding. Thoreau is an inspiring radical voice for personal change and social reform, yet he is, at the same time, extremely self-centered and highly skeptical about the capacity of readers and audiences to bring about the transformations that he advocates.     

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, <Emphasis Type="Italic">March 1917, Node III,The Red Wheel</Emphasis>. Trans. Marian Schwartz

A review of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's March 1917, translated by Marian Schwartz     

The Tradition Industry: Hofstadter and Santayana on Politics,Culture and Capitalism

Richard Hofstadter’s provocative interpretation of what he called The American Political Tradition has long interested students and scholars. Often read as a response to the crisis times of the depression 1930s and interventionist 1940s, the book’s origins are actually rooted in deeper cultural changes in the United States. This paper argues that George Santayana’s earlier essay, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” (1911), anticipated several key aspects of Hofstadter’s argument and proved to more accurately foresee the ideological course of twentieth century American politics.